Description

Storage is a classic subject in computer systems, and current trends are
raising a fresh set of questions about this time-honored topic. One
trend is the prevalence and professionalism of cyber-attacks on storage,
including theft, mutilation, and denial-of-access. Another trend is the
move by small and medium-sized organizations to "outsource"
computation and storage by renting CPUs and disks from a
better-provisioned provider. A third is people sharing data across
organizational boundaries.

This seminar will cover questions raised by these trends. The weekly
work will be to read, and be prepared to discuss, 2-4 papers, most of
which will be recent research papers. Mike and Don will lead the first
few paper discussions; after that, students will lead the discussions.
Depending on interest, there may be a term project in which students are
encouraged to undertake original research.

Topics to be covered will depend in part on students' interests.
Possibilities include research questions such as the following: Should
we replace the abstraction of a file, which has been ascendent for
several decades, with something that explicitly incorporates a notion of
provenance and revision history? How should we build a "utility
storage" system that can serve tens of millions of users yet not
require those users to make assumptions about the failure model or
trustworthiness of the storage system? (Current solutions assume either
limited scale or fail-stop failures.) Right now, the default
configuration of a large-scale computing and storage infrastructure is
"arrays of cheap PCs"; will upcoming changes in economics and
technology affect that default and, if so, how?

Policies

Code of conduct

Participation

This is a seminar, and one of the purposes of a seminar is for students
to think about, and discuss, research papers. My (Mike's) experience has
been that such discussions work best when everyone in the room is
engaged. As a result, we will have the following participation policy
and implementation:

Policy. Everyone must participate in every class meeting in a quality
way.

Implementation. The easiest way that we can think of to implement
the above policy is this: if you volunteer to speak during a given
discussion, great. If you don't volunteer, the discussion leader will
call on you.